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How to Disable Frequent Sites in Firefox Jumplist

Windows 7 has a completely new redesigned taskbar. The most exciting and new feature of Windows 7 taskbar is the jumplists. You can right-click on an application’s icon in the taskbar and it would show you a jumplist – a list of tasks and recently opened files etc. In the case of Mozilla Firefox, the jumplist shows a list of most frequently visited websites. While this is a useful feature if you are the sole user of your computer, it becomes a privacy issue when you share your computer with others. With just a right-click on the Firefox icon, they can find out which sites you spend most time on. If you share you computer with others, then it is a good idea to disable this feature in Firefox.

You can configure Firefox so that it will no longer display the most frequent sites that you have visited in it. You can follow these simple instructions to do so :

Open your Mozilla Firefox web browser from its desktop shortcut and type about:config in the location bar.

Click on the I’ll be careful, I promise! button on the warning page that appears. This would open a list of configuration entries.

In the long list of Firefox configuration entries, it is hard to manually scroll down and locate the entry we want. But we can use the search feature to quickly lookup the desired entry. Type taskbar in the Search field to narrow down the list only to Taskbar related configuration entries. You would be able to find an entry named browser.taskbar.lists.frequent.enabled in the search results.

Double-click on browser.taskbar.lists.frequent.enabled entry to change its value to false. This would disable displaying of the frequent sites list when you right-click on the Firefox icon in the taskbar.

If at any later stage, you want to enable this feature again, then you can follow the same instructions again – just change the value of browser.taskbar.lists.frequent.enabled to true this time.